Bret Stephens Quotes

We tend to think of racism as this interpersonal verbal or physical abuse, when in truth, that is only one way that racism manifests itself. The reality of contemporary racism is that it while it is ubiquitous, it is often invisible, subsequently making it more difficult to name and identify.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

I'm hoping that somehow with songs like 'American Gold' there will be some kind of justice, and people just stop being so close-minded to where they're like, 'Oh, it's not race.' It's easy to say that when you're not black and you haven't experienced it.

One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won't succeed.

I look at racism as one of the social demons. And, in its worst, it's violent and it's a systemic commitment to oppression.

Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this.

I'm not trying to say that it never hurt or that I never felt its sting, but I can honestly say that I never blamed anybody for racism. I have considered it more of a manifestation of humanity's problem rather than my personal problem.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

Let me just say that to imagine racism does not exist is imagination. And to imagine that it does not create its own set of problems is true imagination. So let's not imagine that racism is gone, extinguished, because it's not. We are seeing this in the top levels of the political arena, and we are seeing it very, very plainly.

If black people mistrust white people, they are mistrusting racism, and that is appropriate.

Seems to me that the institutions that function in this country are clearly racist, and that they're built upon racism.

As an African-American, I know all too well the negative thoughts and feelings hatred and bigotry cause.

This is a racist country.

This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

When you allow racial disparity and institutional inequity to affect one part of the country, eventually it's coming back to get everyone.

The worst disease from which the society of our nation suffers is ... the treatment of the Negro.

Ours has not been a racially democratic society for 300 years.

It is now time to mobilize, before it is too late, against the creeping legitimacy of racism in our society.

Thought the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resisted at every step of his progress.